FILMVIRUS presents TRAILERS

FILMVIRUS and THE READING ROOM would like to present our special new year’s gift – FILMVIRUS: RHIZOME, programmes of selected rare experimental films from all around the world.

It’s your chance here to see TRAILERS, the latest feature film of Rouzbeh Rashidi, one of the most prominent Irish filmmakers today from Dublin’s Experimental Film Society. From Italy, Enzo Cillo will captivate you with his filmography of darkness and beauty. Also added with another film from George Clark, a curator plus experimental filmmaker from UK. Rare breed of shorts from Chinese video artist Lu Yang could challenge and destroy your senses. Special programmes from Saigon-based Trương Minh Quý, his debut feature City of Mirrors world-premiered at Busan. And double experimental programmes from Nguyen Trinh Thi, one of the most important filmmakers in Southeast Asia region who founded Hanoi DocLab, which helps create new generations of Vietnamese filmmaker, film screenings and challenge us with interesting documentary works for all these years.

“As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of ‘things’ and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those ‘things.’ A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a ‘rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.’ The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

“In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.” Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus